1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to digital video processing, and more particularly, to temporal interpolation of digital video frames.
2. Description of the Related Art
Digital video compression is used to reduce the quantity of data used to represent digital video images, and may be a combination of spatial image compression and temporal motion compensation. Digital video compression and decompression schemes often result in jerky or inaccurate object motions appearing within the video due to a particular compression scheme used to achieve a large compression ratio, moving objects being blocked in a video frame by other objects, a very low bit rate requirement, and/or due to skipped or missing video frames.
To smooth out object motions, motion compensated temporal interpolation (MCTI) may be used in which a block-based motion search is implemented to establish temporal association between two adjacent reconstructed frames. Both forward and backward searches are used to account for uncovered and newly covered areas. With MCTI, one or more frames can be interpolated or inserted between the two adjacent frames with acceptable visual quality. MCTI creates an image in between the two adjacent frames based on motion vectors by projecting picture elements (pixels) from current and/or previous frames onto a predetermined temporal position. The quality of the reconstructed image depends greatly on the quality of these motion vectors for the object.